Samvada Baduku Community College has designed a special three-month online course for college lecturers called Learner Lecturer. The course has been designed to aid the professional development of lecturers, through support for research, and improving their teaching methods.

Since the world of formal education is seeing tremendous changes as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, governments, across the world, have begun to emphasise online learning and teaching. In India, these changes have raised important questions about the digital divide, social inclusion, internet penetration across social classes, and the very possibility of effective engagement through online/virtual classrooms.

Within school education, the shift to online classes has teachers worried, with many private-school teachers complaining of bullying from parents within their virtual classrooms. Within government schools that often lack basic infrastructure, and cater to the socially marginalised, the availability of sufficient bandwidth and laptops/smart-phones is a serious question. In Karnataka’s colleges, even as lecturers struggle to finish the syllabus through zoom, or whatsapp videos/audios, they struggle with unfamiliar technology and new modalities of student engagement.

These are no doubt, significant and complex issues, with few easy resolutions. Meanwhile, however, the fact remains that lecturers are compelled to adapt and learn, to teach in an online mode. Along with learning new modalities, teachers are grappling with new questions regarding their own academic growth.

In keeping with Samvada Baduku’s commitment to social justice, Learner Lecturer hopes to reach lecturers from socially marginalised contexts, and enable them to carve out both meaningful careers for themselves, and effective classrooms for their students.

The course begins from June 15, 2020. Classes will be held online, in the evenings for 4 days a week. Alongside Baduku Community College faculty, subject-experts from different disciplines will act as resource-persons for the course.

Those interested in the course, may contact :
7899769899, 9880620890
www.samvadabaduku.org
badukulenses@gmail.com